


Fractal

by Amand_r



Category: Star Wars: New Jedi Order Era - Various
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 20:44:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/141553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amand_r/pseuds/Amand_r
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Valin doesn't understand who moves him in a universe that is supposed to stay still.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fractal

**Author's Note:**

  * For [djcati](https://archiveofourown.org/users/djcati/gifts).



> To djcati: I was skeptical, but I think I like Valin now too.
> 
> Foreshadowing for Fate of the Jedi Series. Written to [Yoko Kanno's Sacred Terrorist](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cvYnk1Dqa0) on repeat.

"It's important that you remember," Valin said to himself. Out the transparisteel, the stars drifted. Or at least it _looked_ like they drifted. It was really the _Errant Venture_ that was drifting. Stars were stationary.

Actually, they weren't. Master Ifrit had never told him about the shift in the stars and the planets, though in the last few weeks, Valin had learnt that there were many basic things that no one had ever taught him.

What was the difference between being taught and learning for oneself? Hearing a sound a making it yourself, maybe.

"Hey," Sannah said, coming along from down the hallway. "I think your dad is looking for you."

"My dad is never looking for me," Valin said softly. If Dad wanted him so badly, he could sense him, and not rely on his eyes or ears.

"He's setting out again, I think with Anakin." The star Valin had been following with his eyes slipped behind the steel frame of the window and the ship twisted millimeter by millimeter. He knew millimeters. Garnants thought in millimeters, and slipping into their consciousness always signaled a slowing down of everything—-millimeters were faster than the speed of light if you were one size, unnoticeable if you were another. To the garnant on the _Errant Venture_ , maybe the passage of time would be nothing.

"We were supposed to spar," Valin said under his breath. He hadn't really expected it to happen anyway. It was a war, he was a kid, Anakin and his dad were heroes. They fought for real all the time, and not just for practice.

Sannah shook herself. "Anakin's pretty much a Jedi Knight now," she said to the window and not to him. "He's busy."

Valin closed his eyes and felt around for something, anything alive that he could manipulate with the force. Being in Grandpa's off planet world was stifling, like finding that one's fingers didn't bend anymore.

His father had once told him that he had to find other ways.

"It's important that you remember," he whispered again.

"Remember what?" Sannah asked, one index finger tracing the movement of a ship across the window.

Valin stuffed both of his hands in his pockets. He didn't want to touch it; he knew how cold it would be ( _It will be even colder in the Maw._ ). "Everything," he said, but not to her.

***

If the whole universe, the whole of existence was also drifting, Valin thought, that must mean that it was turning _in_ something larger.

"You've moved into the idea of the Unmoved Mover," Kam told him as they sat on one of the benches in the Maw commissary. Valin sipped the caf in front of him, but he didn't taste it. Being in the Maw was like wearing a hood all the time.

"The what?"

Kam leant as if his bench had a back, and Valin wondered if he was using the force to cushion himself. It seemed like a waste of an ability. "The Unmoved Mover. If everything was put into motion by something, eventually there has to be something that wasn't created by anything else. It created itself. Or it just is."

A thread tickled the back of his head. Garnants on the skull. "The Force."

Something in the Maw shifted, a black hole eating something that used to be alive; everything was alive from a certain point of view. Kam didn't shudder, but he turned his head to look out at the darkness, the thing that Valin wanted to call _nothing_ , but was starting to suspect was actually everything. The colour black was all other colours absorbed into it. Funny that black was considered a negative thing, when it was so inclusive. White, the thing that reflected all things, was considered better, a solitary thing.

"I can't answer that," Kam told him. "You have to find the answer."

Valin emptied his cup; even now he could feel the stimulant in it being absorbed and seeping into his bloodstream, suffusing his nerves and his brain, synapses firing overtime. All that he could feel and never touch, never move. Not unless he convinced a dust mote to do it for him.

"Is there an answer to find?" Valin mumbled. Lessons at the Praxeum had taught him that 'You'll have to find out for yourself' was Jedi code for 'pick a stance you like and argue it forever.'

Kam tapped two fingers on the table, but he didn't say anything.

***

 _I always thought Master Solusar was a little...thinky,_ Anakin wrote. _Not that that's a bad thing. I think he just works on another level. But you know, while you're there, you should study everything you can, right? If you come up with anything not boring, let me know. :P_

Valin sat back, staring out at the transparisteel. Anakin was long gone, Myrkr had ensured his death, as sure as he'd probably thought he was making a valiant choice. Sannah said that Anakin was a hero, and that might very well have been true.

The Maw radiated quiet in the way that white reflected everything. For once, something was cooking under the surface. Valin could feel it in his brain, in the back part he reserved for the quiet moments. There were a lot of quiet moments these days, rather like the Maw was the eye of a storm and they were just waiting for the arms of the storm to toss them out into the water again.

 _While you're there, you should study everything you can, right?_

 _Do as I say, not as I do._

 _Before he died, he understood the necessity of his death. You must understand it, as well._

Valin opened the canister of garnants and turned it on its side. The little creatures exited the container and wandered about on his tabletop. They looked like garnants, but they weren't. They responded to his touch, to his thoughts, but they weren't the same. How had they been replaced?

Valin reached out to touch one of them, but even this close to the creature, he couldn't perceive how the switch had been made, or how he knew that the garnants weren't real garnants.

He picked up the datapad on the desk and brought it down on the treacherous little things before they could accomplish whatever damage they had planned.

***

The wind was synthetic. It was difficult to think of Zonama as anything but alive and fake at the same time, now that the secret was out and the Vong were returning. The planet was welcoming its returning children, opening the secrets of itself more and more every day. The planet turned in the orbit by Coruscant, and the villages were swelling with Vong, anxious and wary to settle and unfold their own biots in the place.

The guide took him out of La'okio and towards the wilderness. Valin didn't need a guide. He wasn't looking for anything, really, just silence, a creature that would answer to him, on whose mind he could settle like a butterfly alighting on a flower for a few seconds.

The Ferroan left him in the Boras grove at the edge of the tampasi. Valin understood that no two Boras were alike, but it didn't hurt to look for the signs. From this depth, so far removed, they all looked the same in the dim light of the bioluminescent insects resting on the lower boughs.

"What are you finding?" said a voice behind him, and he reached out to sense them, but only came up with the planet itself: Sekot. Tahiri and Jacen Solo had said that Sekot appeared when ze chose.

He turned and looked at the form the planet had chosen, a young Anakin Skywalker, padawan robes in startling contrast to the enveloping darkness that swirled about the tampasi in eddies.

"I'm wondering why you choose to look like him, knowing what happened to him," he said, reaching out and running one hand on the smooth surface of a large rock before sitting down, fingers flush with the cold planes under him. Under his feet insects scurried. Did Sekot feel every single one of them, too?

"I thought I'd assume a shape you could identify with," Sekot said, sitting on the rock next to him. He felt it when ze did.

"I didn't know that Anakin," Valin said. "I knew the other one."

"Does it matter which one? Isn't a name a thing on its own?"

The fake wind ruffled the fake trees. He had to stop thinking of things as real and not real. If they were here, they were real. And they were all in the Force, right?

Anakin had once said that the Force was a tool to be used, but Tahiri had told him he'd changed his mind before he died. Valin wanted to ask him what he thought. He wanted to ask him what he thought of Zonama Sekot, but he had never been here, and he never would be.

"I was named after my grandfather, too," Valin said, "but it's not as bad as all that."

Sekot stared at hir hands. "I don't have hands. Or I have many." Ze shrugged. "Or none of them are mine. I'm just me, or maybe what lies on my surface is all for me to claim responsibility for."

Valin watched a few iridescent insects leave the trees and flit about in the dark. "That’s a lot of responsibility." He paused. "It's important to remember."

"I move myself, but who moves me?" Sekot said suddenly.

"The Force," he answered, parroting out the answer that he didn't believe but wanted to. Stang, he wanted to.

Sekot stood, though that was pointless for something that could blink in and out of vision, if not being. Valin didn't want to look at Anakin Skywalker. He didn't want the planet to be a form any more than he figured the garnants would like to know that the things shaping their thoughts had a face and a name. And a will that was not theirs.

But it was something, wasn't it? Something Anakin left to him in that last missive, something the Maw had given him as a gift, the ability to see and learn and know when things were false. It had started in the Maw, but Zonama was causing it grow.

What would Anakin have said about the tool this planet was? The tool the garnants had become? Or would he have striven to find the mover Master Solusar had suggested was there? Now that the Vong and their absence in the Force had been explained, he probably would have answers for Valin.

The insects shifted on the bough of one tree, and Valin reached out to tell them something false, to get them to move, but was that like forcing Sekot to do something? Was he bound by courtesy? What happened when the mover would not, could not move?

In the end, he settled for sighing and closing his eyes, reaching out for something in himself that he could ground into the damp earth. Out of the corner of his consciousness, he saw the white of the Maw, reflecting, hiding, digging in, a mover in the dark, saying, _'It's important that you don't remember.'_

END


End file.
